Ales for Burns Supper

Jan 25 2008 by Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

TODAY and over the weekend, the world will reverberate to the skirl of bagpipes and the swirl of whisky.

Haggis sales are set to treble and kilt-hire shop-owners will be dancing in the streets. Today marks the start of the Burns Supper season; the annual homage to Robert Burns, literary genius, humanitarian, romantic philanderer, Scotland’s national poet and a character who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven, Rembrandt and George Best for his blanket-covering talent.

Several clubs, associations and societies across the region are preparing for the Burns Night ritual. Many a myth surrounds the man and his womanising, hard-drinking lifestyle.

He drank beer, whisky and, most of all, port. He wrote poems praising them; about making love in a field (“I kiss’d her owre and owre again, amang the rigs o’ barley”), and personified the main whisky ingredient as John Barleycorn.

Burns’ favourite haunt was the Globe Inn in Dumfries, a town-centre pub still very much alive and kicking today. It was established in 1610, nestling down a narrow wynd but is now surrounded by modern shops.

His favourite chair stills sits by the fireside and his handwriting is etched into a bedroom window. The reason he inscribed a verse with a diamond ring is one we can only guess at:

“O lovely Polly Stewart

O Charming Polly Stewart

There’s not a flower that blooms in May

That’s half so fair as thou art.”

It is also where it is believed an affair took place with Anna Park, a barmaid and niece of the landlord at the time, and she subsequently gave birth to a daughter. Never one to keep mum, he wrote:

“Yest’re’en I had a pint of wine,

A place where body saw na;

Yest’re’en lay on this breast o’ mine

The gowden locks o’ Anna.”

The Globe’s romantic couplings are now normally satisfied by Bard’s Ale (which is re-badged Belhaven 80/-), and Deuchar’s IPA, the Champion Beer of Britain in 2002.

In 1796, Burns mentioned the pub in a letter “which these many years has been my Howff” and in 1819, the first of what was to become the annual tradition of Burns Suppers was held when the local Mausoleum Committee met and decided to make it an annual celebration of the Bard. The following year they formed the Dumfries Burns Club.

Central to the evening’s recitals of Burns’ prodigious output of verse and tune is the haggis and its accompaniment, “champit tatties and bashed neeps” (which meets southern tongues as mashed potatoes and turnip). Haggis – “great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race” – is the culinary essence of a Burns Supper which begins when the chairman invites the company to receive the dish brought to the table by the chef, preceded by a kilted piper. A gill of whisky is offered to the bearers and, with a flourish and a few words from Address To A Haggis, it is sliced open with the edge of a finely-honed skean dhu (ceremonial dirk) to reveal the “warm, reekin’, rich” contents.

Later, a musically-inclined guest or two might sing a Burns poem set to music and the chairman, or designated speaker, delivers the Immortal Memory address. This should be a somewhat serious and careful consideration of the life and art of Burns.

Following a Toast To The Lassies – a traditional Burns Night ritual – there’s a Reply From The Lassies, and no Burns Supper is complete without a recital of Tam o’ Shanter. Then some closing remarks and thanks are offered before Auld Lang Syne is sung to the tune of yet more John Barleycorn.

Haggis, of course, is made from offal, the edible waste of a butchered animal. We, as a nation, generally display a certain squeamishness towards its consumption, though most countries regard it in terms of a delicacy (the French ferchuse, for instance, combines pigs’ hearts and lungs with red wine, potatoes and onions) and we have developed a glossary of euphemistic terms to disguise its origins. “Pluck”, for example, is a catch-all term for heart and liver; lungs masquerade as lights and melts are sanitised spleen.

An old recipe advises: “Clean a sheep’s pluck thoroughly. Make incisions in the heart and liver to allow the blood to flow out and parboil them, letting the windpipe lie over the side of the pot to permit the phlegm and blood to disgorge from the lungs.”

Whisky, of course, needn’t be the main accompaniment to haggis; several beers meet its spicy character head-on and it would seem that those with a higher alcohol content are more successful partners. Belgian beers such as Duvel, Brugge Tripel and Chimay Blue come up to the mark, but as this is a mainly Scottish affair, darker offerings like those from the Orkney Brewery, Dark Island and Skull Splitter are worth knocking the top off.

Tullibardine 1488 Majestic Whisky Ale (7.0% alcohol by volume) is brewed on the site of Tullibardine distillery and in its first incarnation was Scotland’s first-ever brewery which was patronised by King James IV after his coronation in 1488. The ale is conditioned in oak casks formerly used for Tullibardine Highland Malt Whisky – generally recognised as an “easy-drinking” malt and an ideal pre-dinner appetiser. It is smooth and mellow on the palate with a fruity flavour and has a clean crisp finish. It opens on the nose with a fresh, floral scent and hints of vanilla and chocolate orange. The Whisky Ale absorbs those characteristics and is surprisingly light and easy to drink for a beer of such a strength. The cask maturation process smears its malt-heavy flavour like a chasing dram.

Belhaven Robert Burns Scottish Ale (4.2% ABV) is rather charming with a sherbet toffee flavour, if such a thing exists, then leans towards maltiness on the palate. It is strangely spritzy and its pleasing deep red-to-brown colour is set off by a firm, clean, white head.

Fyne Ales Maverick (4.2% ABV). Could Robert Burns be described as any other than a person of independent and unorthodox views? The beer is a mahogany-coloured, robust bitter with roasted malt flavours which are neatly balanced by citrus fruit hop aromas. The Fyne Ales range is brewed in a former milking parlour at the landward end of Loch Fyne, Scotland’s longest sea loch. It rests amid magnificent mountain majesty and spectacular shoreline scenery. Its owners are Jonny and Tuggy Delap – Tuggy is the great grand-daughter of Sir Andrew Noble, Tyneside tycoon and business partner of Lord Armstrong who formed the company that in 1928 became Vickers-Armstrong. Once of Jesmond Dene House in Newcastle, Sir Andrew built Ardkinglas, a holiday home on the estate that the brewery is now part of.

As today is the 249th anniversary of Burns’ birth, it may be an appropriate moment to blow the cobwebs off a hoary tale. Prince Philip was being shown round a new hospital and was making all the correct noises of approval, until he came to one ward where the occupants were walking up and down, reciting: “A man’s a man for a’ that” then “Wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie” and “My love is like a red, red rose”. The dignitaries stopped and Prince Philip asked what was going on.

“That,” said the guide, “is the Serious Burns Unit.”

alastair.gilmour@ncjmedia.co.uk

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Man to man, the world, o'er shall brothers be for a' that

I couldn’t let the passing of Mr Abdul Latif go without paying tribute to a man of enormous wit, talent and generosity, and a character who supplied this newspaper with countless stories over the years, most of them light-hearted and positive.

We would often pass the time of day in Newcastle’s Bigg Market where he ran the Rupali Restaurant (later to become Curry Capital).

Last June I persuaded him to provide a curry- and-beer matching lunch for this column (it didn’t take much cajoling as Latif was the master of business promotion). Though he didn’t drink himself, he was acutely aware of different accompaniments to food and we spent a terrific couple of hours talking food, politics, culture and coriander.

He agreed with my conclusion that Newcastle Brown Ale is a surprisingly good partner with all strengths of curry. He held up a bottle and said: "Someone has made this for himself; it’s a drink, not a money-making machine. You can tell they would have enjoyed tasting what they invented 60 years ago. People come from all over the country to see if I’m real. I’m real all right. They want to see the Lord of Harpole for themselves – the Geordie Lord – and I tell them ‘you’ve come to see me, a Geordie lad, a bonny lad, so you’ll have to have a Newcastle Brown and it’s only then that you can say you’ve visited the North-East’."

Terrific. A wonderful guy; he’ll be an enormous miss.